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Hi, Gretchen:

I sympathize with your predicament.  I'm not sure I completely follow your distinction between process and content, but I fully get that a list-serv can't be everything to everyone.

Nonetheless, we LIS instructors at Western are witnessing something that is changing the way we teach, and the way we approach teaching LIS.  My students, who are just starting an expensive program of study, are looking me with wide, scared eyes: until very recently, the professionals that they hope to be were walking up and down on a picket line; undergraduates were shrugging and saying they didn't care what happened to the library; for most of the campus, it was business as usual.  Behind every question about AACR, RDA and MARC, I'm hearing a subtext: is there any point learning this stuff?

At the heart of this grim instance of collective bargaining lies a compelling and urgent truth about LIS education: we simply MUST educate students, not just to do their jobs, but to explain, defend, define and redefine their jobs in an articulate, persuasive way.  If we can't do that, we educators will disappear, and we'll deserve to disappear.

Under the weight of that realization, it's difficult for us to care about the distinctions you draw between process and content.  AS LIS educators, we have found it impossible to draw such distinctions, and impossible to prevent this strike from affecting our educational mandate profoundly.  To ignore it would be to ignore an elephant--a very, very, very big elephant--that has perched itself on the couch and is eating all the appetizers.

I don't presume to tell you how to run your list.  But I hope you'll understand how things look from my end.

With respect and good wishes,
Grant Campbell
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
University of Western Ontario

On 09/26/11, Gretchen Whitney <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
[log in to unmask]" class="iwcQuote" style="border-left: 1px solid #00F; padding-left: 13px; margin-left: 0;" type="cite">
Greetings,
  Thanks for your comments.  You are not alone. Several folks are upset by my not posting to jESSE the labor union thoughts.  There are other places for the discussion of labor unions in libraries, but I confess readily that I don't know what they are.  But jESSE is not the place for them.

 The focus of jESSE is as the website says

promotes discussion of library and information science education issues in a world-wide context. It addresses issues of curricula, administration, research, and education theory and practice as they relate to information science issues in general, and in general academia as the membership feels so moved.

The focus for jESSE is not on content, but on process for LIS education. That is, how is the student taught about information science concepts - not on what labor unions are currently doing. It is not only the software being used by what company, but how faculty and students are being educated to use those technologies.  jESSE focuses on how students are taught, and how students learn, in today's information rich environment. How do students learn about labor unions, vs the MARC format? How do students learn about social issues regarding their professional context, or technical details?  Both are equally important, yet how are they balanced?

If jESSE focused on the content of an LIS education at the graduate level, it would have to cover not only the means of production of book, serial, video, and other media, but the politics of information management in a democracy (and in a dictatorship, for that matter), the issue of universal bibliographic control and how that matters for a culture, the cultural implications of different kinds of software (the cloud, for example, and how that differs from personal computers and the use of mainframes in the 1980s), the reading habits of adults and children, and a host of other issues.

This is simply more than jESSE can handle.  Other websites and social media deal with library issues and information science issues. Someone brought up a website that is trying to pull together these content issues and I support that effort.  jESSE deals with process - education - issues, and not content or resources issues.

 (What should be in the curriculum of a newly aspiring information professional is a subject for another day.  But the question has been raised.)

  --gw


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Gretchen Whitney, PhD, Retired
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee, Knoxville TN 37996 USA           [log in to unmask]
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/
jESSE:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html
SIGMETRICS:http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/sigmetrics.html
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On Mon, 26 Sep 2011, Joyce M Latham wrote:

>I have to say I am flumoxed by your choice not to post information about librarians on strike.  I am a library educator, and a scholar of unions in libraries and you are just wrong ... again.
>
>Joyce M. Latham, PhD
>School of Information Studies
>University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
>Bolton Hall, Room 554
>414-229-3205
>
>
>
>

--
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D. Grant Campbell
Associate Professor
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
N6A 5B7
519-661-2111 ext.88483